"While much of the tech world views a two-year-old smartphone as hopelessly obsolete, large swaths of our transportation and military infrastructure, some modern businesses, and even a few computer programmers rely daily on technology that hasn't been updated for decades." Back when I still worked at a hardware and plumbing store - up until about 4-5 years ago - we used MS-DOS cash registers. They are still in use today. If it works, it works.

"The move to web-based systems has made things even slower. Now, in addition to mousing around, they have to wait for the server to send down the UI. At least now we have AJAX and CSS. Around the mid-2000s, it was really intolerable."

I've been involved in some corporate web transition projects, and the performance of web versions are nearly always disappointing compared against the older FAT-apps that had near instantaneous response times. Officially we'd claim that the overall experience was faster because users could do more per screen, which can be true. But personally I had to hide my disappointment over refresh latency between postbacks. The administrators don't notice it so much, but the end users certainly do as they become experts at using the system.